The present application relates to computing, and more specifically to use of software tokens to facilitate securely conveying information in a computing environment.
Systems and methods involving sharing and/or using confidential or secret information among computing devices, software applications, and/or other computing environment resources are employed in various demanding applications, including collaborative enterprise, software development, social networking, and other applications. Such applications often demand efficient mechanisms for selectively sharing or exchanging information without compromising authentication credentials that may be required to access the information.
Efficient and secure mechanisms for selectively conveying information between users and/or computing resources of a computing environment can be particularly important in cloud-based enterprise computing environments, which often involve extensive collaboration between users, and may frequently require exchange of confidential information between many users and/or software applications and databases.
Typically, confidential information is only accessible to a particular enterprise user or software application after the user and/or software application supplies authentication credentials for authentication, i.e., after identity verification and determination of associated privileges for accessing, saving, or otherwise using data and/or functionality associated with the confidential information.
Conventionally, to retrieve or save secure data, a software application used in a networked computing environment may employ a secure connection to an external server. The secure connection, i.e., a connection requiring authentication, is often established using authentication credentials, e.g., username and password or authentication certificate, whereby the software application uses the credentials to log into the external server to set up a secure computing session between the software application (e.g., browser) and the external server.
Accordingly, a software user (e.g., software developer) with access to such authentication information will often input the authentication information into a software application to enable user access to data and/or functionality associated with the authentication information and associated account.
However, in certain scenarios, e.g., in certain collaborative cloud computing environments, the user may wish to share information that is accessible via the supplied authentication information, but without sharing or disclosing the authentication information. Conventionally, efficient mechanisms for enabling a user and/or software application to selectively share such data and/or functionality are severely limited.